Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #1636 Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 1636 Scott Adams - The News is Delicious Today and So Are You. Get in Here

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r if it's a coincidence. Well according to some reporting by Axios the commander-in-chief of the United States is Tucker Carlson. And by that I mean that his Axios reports that behind the scenes the Republicans are being very influenced by his opinion on let's not get into a war with Russia. And I believe that in effect because we have this you know a country that's kind of balanced left and righ…

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flexible. Like we respond to stuff like almost a creature. It's kind of awesome.

Anyway I've got a new hashtag to represent the fact that the people leading the country are the people we trust. It's hashtag NoJoe because we've got leadership without Joe. Rogan I'm sorry without, we do we do have Joe Rogan. We have leadership without Joe Biden. So it's sort of a no-Joe situation. You've heard of somebody being a no-show. He's a no-Joe.

Somebody's on local saying that a big part of my premise is that the public operates like a beast at least in America. Now I don't know that that's the case if you've got, I would imagine it's not the case if you have a dictatorship. The dictator does what the dictator does right? Maybe a small group of people influencing. But in this country the especially connected by social media there are people who do what I do which is sort of opiniony people that sort of concentrate people's opinions and people gravitate to certain people's opinions. You know the Joe Rogans, Tim Pools, still legacy media as well. And then somehow there's also then there's a second level of negotiation right?

So the first level of negotiation is information hits the public and it's just in this big stew. And then the opinion makers such as myself, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, you know I'm obviously the small version of that but the opinion makers then start to harden opinions. And then the public in this big roiling boil of soup they start to harden around certain opinions. And then the opinion makers start negotiating with each other am I right? Because you'll see me say oh somebody, Joe Rogan says something I don't agree with or Tim Pool would say something I said doesn't agree with. So you see the opinion makers start to negotiate with each other and then the public watches them negotiate and then they you know in some cases they'll change teams and stuff. But you're actually watching within the republic we formed a new animal. It's like a beast.

And just like I was describing earlier driving a Mustang is like controlling a beast. Like the country has just turned into a beast. And the beast I don't know it's like artificial intelligence. It's like an organic artificial intelligence in the sense that we have individual intelligence separately. We have a government which forms you know maybe a function like intelligence sometimes. But beyond that there's this other ecosystem of you know opinion makers absorbing people and negotiating like a mind you know like a creature's mind.

When you make a decision on your own do you feel competing? It's almost like there's a bunch of people competing in your head. Do you conceptualize it that way? It's almost like there's different voices in there. Some of them are talking some of them are feeling. Yeah but somehow because of social media we've turned the whole at least the United States and anybody who's a free person who can watch the internet so we've turned all free people into that version of the conversations in one head that turn into one opinion when it comes out of your mouth. And it's actually it's thrilling.

And here's the interesting part. You know we're worried about the singularity which is what's called when the computers reach artificial intelligence to the point where the computers can learn on their own and then they will learn so quickly that they will instantly or almost quickly become so powerful that humans won't be able to control them. But here's the counter to that. At the same time that machines are becoming insanely smart so too there's this whole new organic creature of human beings that has spontaneously formed because of various evolutionary forces including the news and everything else to form like a super intelligence.

Now do you think that the artificial intelligence which will be insanely smart, smarter than any one person certainly smarter than all of our smartest people that the computer will be, but will the smartest computer under AI be able

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to compete with whatever we have formed here which is an organic super brain? Because I would guess that for every computer that has a way to beat us there's at least one person who knows a way to beat it. So I'm not so sure that's not a fair fight because we have numbers if nothing else right? Well as soon as there's a super intelligence the first thing you should do is block the other super int…

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